The Project

The goal of this project is to provide linguistic analyses of a set of sentences. The sentences, which are listed below, were composed by a friend of mine, Stephanie Brooks, an artist whose work is largely (though not entirely) concerned with aspects of language. (Some of Stephanie's work can be viewed here.) Stephanie is interested in the different kinds of representations that linguists use to characterize the formal properties of sentences: the kinds of information they are meant to encode, the kinds of analytical assumptions they reflect, and their inherent structure all by itself. She asked me if I could provide her with structural analyses of the sentences listed below that reflect different ways of analyzing them, based either on level of representation or on type of analysis. I thought about this for a while, imagining how the sentences would be analyzed from different perspectives (Aspects-era transformational grammar; "classic" GB; type-logical categorial grammar; HPSG; dependency grammar; autosegmental phonology; Optimality Theory; etc.), and finally came to the conclusion that the right way to convey the variety and richness of all the potential linguistics analyses was to engage the linguistics community itself in the project.

To this end, I am asking soliciting the help and creativity of fellow linguists. If you are interestedin contributing to this project, please choose one or more of the sentences listed below and analyze it whatever way you wish, at any level (or levels) of representation, using whatever framework or theory you find most interesting or engaging. I will leave it to you to define your terminology or representational conventions as you see fit (or not at all). I will collect the analyses as they come in and pass them on to Stephanie, with attribution, but you must be willing in advance to allow her to use the representations as she sees fit, with or without acknowledgment of their sources. I will also figure out a good way of posting analyses on this website as often as I am able to.

Please submit analyses in pdf format to me at this email address. Thank you for your help with this project, and have fun!

The Sentences

Landscape/Aesthetics
1a. It was a mediocre sunset.
1b. The sunset this evening was mediocre.
1c. This evening's sunset was mediocre.
2. The landscape was both beautiful and desolate.
3. The underdog carnation is preferable to the self-congratulatory rose.
4. She surveyed the scenery with disgust. She had no use for quaint.
5. She decided that a nautical metaphor was more appropriate than a lunar metaphor or a botanical metaphor.

Intimacies
6. Her sincerity frightened him and his irony bored her.
7. She enjoys intimacy with strangers.
8. She felt weak whenever their eyes met.
9. I could write a poem that would break your fucking heart.
10. Unrequited love can go fuck itself.

Affect
11. Anger is an easier emotion than sadness.
12. Her affect didn’t match her expression.
13. She is sentimental in a brutalist sort of way.

Last updated: 7 November, 2011